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Sunday, 20 March 2016

The Inside Story of Syriza’s Capitulation to the European Union

This is an edited extract and summary of a much longer interview in New
Left Review with Stathis Kouvelakis, a former member of Syriza’s central
committee and one of the leaders of the party’s Left Platform. He is now a
member of Popular Unity after resigning from Syriza in the aftermath of the
Greece’s handling of the financial crisis.

The interview provides a fascinating insight into what was
going on at the time, and the full version is well worth a read.

The Evolution of
Syriza

The Tsipras leadership
made very clear and, in a sense, very tough decisions in that summer of 2012,
about the party’s line and about the type of party they wanted. First, they
needed to turn a coalition of disparate organizations into a unified party; this
was quite widely recognized, and there was no real disagreement about it.
They also wanted to use the unification process to transform the culture of the party and its organizational
structure at a very deep level. Instead of a push to recruit people who’d been
active in the social mobilizations of the period, the aim was to open the gates
to the sort of people who want to join a party when they think it has a serious
chance of accessing power—clientelist mentalities and habits are very deeply
rooted in Greek society, including in the popular classes; there’s a type of
micromanagement of social relations.

Kouvelakis says that many of these people were from a PASOK
background, the nominally social democratic party whose actions had contributed
hugely to the crisis when they were in power, often practising corruption. He
then goes to say:

Turning Syriza into a
leader-centred party was the second aspect of the process. The aim was to move
from a militant party of the left, with a strong culture of internal debate,
heterogeneity, involvement in social movements and mobilizations, to a party with
a passive membership which could be more easily manipulated by the centre, and
keener to identify with the figure of the leader.

The inner-party
restructuring went together with the rightward drift. From the summer of 2012
onwards, the position on the euro was transformed into a constant display of
fidelity to the Eurozone. This was expressed in Tsipras’s trips to mainstream
institutions, mainly in the US—the Brookings Institute and so on….Second, from
2012 onwards, the type of political practice favoured by the Tsipras leadership
didn’t move beyond parliamentarism….At this point the Tsipras leadership also
started building bridges to people in the core state apparatuses—military and
diplomatic circles—and began to indicate their loyalty to the fundamental
tenets of the Greek state.

Domestic Policy

There was an
unprecedentedly low level of legislative activity. No more than ten or twelve
bills were passed in that first period. Most were positive, but they were very
limited: a minimal package to deal with the humanitarian crisis, about
one-sixth of the package announced in the Thessaloniki programme, including
reconnection of electricity, but targeting only the most desperate cases; the
€5 entry ticket to go to hospital was scrapped—a widely hated Memorandum
measure.

In a few cases, Left
Platform ministers could pursue some initiatives. For instance, Lafazanis
blocked privatization of land around Piraeus and of the national power company.

Greece’s obsession
with the Euro

First, one shouldn’t
underestimate the popularity of the euro in the southern-periphery
countries—Greece, Spain, Portugal—for whom joining the EU meant accessing
political and economic modernity. For Greece, in particular, it meant being
part of the West in a different way to that of the US-imposed post-civil war
regime…Having the same currency as the most advanced countries has a tremendous
power over people’s imagination—carrying in your pocket the same currency as
Germans or Dutch, even if you are a low-paid Greek worker or pensioner—which
those of us who’d been in favour of exiting the euro since the start of the
crisis tended to underestimate.

Even now, after five
years of some of the hardest shock therapy ever imposed—and the first imposed
on a Western European country—public opinion is still split on the issue of the
euro, although now with a much narrower majority in favour of staying in.

Second, in contrast to
the position of Sweden, Denmark or the UK, for Greece quitting the euro would
be extremely conflictual, because it would mean breaking with the neoliberal
policies of the Memoranda. If you are serious about this, you have to be
prepared for a confrontation. From 2012, when Syriza emerged as the largest
opposition party, poised for government, it was clear that Tsipras didn’t want
that fight, which is why he switched to a stance of staying in the Eurozone.
Syriza’s original position was summed up by two slogans: ‘No sacrifice for the
euro’ and ‘The euro is not a fetish’, which left open the question of how far
to go in confronting the Eurogroup and the Troika. But this line was shelved
soon after the June 2012 elections.

In the summer of 2015
it was Tsipras who used the argument of fear—that exiting the euro would mean
chaos. In early June, after the Eurogroup rejected the Greek terms, which had
already been intended as a capitulation, the Syriza Finance Minister Euclid
Tsakalotos was asked by Paul Mason what would happen if Greece left the euro.
He replied that it would be a return to the 1930s—the rise of Nazism! Tsipras
himself used the image of collective suicide. What such statements reveal is
that, for the Syriza leadership, exit was unthinkable—a black hole. It was
outside their cognitive mapping, alien to their strategy which had already
ruled out the possibility of an all-out confrontation.

Tsipras the Leader

Tsipras’s personal
staff were beyond the control of anyone in the party. So was the Commission for
the Programme—essentially dominated by the Commission for the Economy, led by
Yannis Dragasakis…Dragasakis wanted his hands completely free. He knew he
couldn’t put the programme he really wanted down on paper, because the party
wouldn’t accept it—but he was the most open in saying the only option was
improved management of the Memoranda framework.

When Tsipras went to
address what was, in a way, the real audience—the representatives of ruling
circles in Europe and the US—the logic of what he was saying was: ‘Look, I’ll
lay down my radicalism, of which you are rightly afraid, but in which I don’t
genuinely believe. I see things differently now, and I’m ready to be a nice
boy, much more reasonable than you think—but I should get something in return.’
He really believed he could get something—that was clear.

The result, you could
say, was objectively the worst political betrayal perpetrated by any contemporary
left-wing force—certainly in Europe.

Perhaps one could
compare Tsipras to Achille Occhetto, the Italian Communist Party leader who
liquidated the whole tradition of the party. Occhetto visited NATO headquarters
in Brussels and said, ‘This is the centre of world peace.’ He visited Wall
Street and said, ‘This is the temple of civilization.’

These are things no
social democrat, or even a conservative, would ever say. The Italian Marxist
Constanzo Preve made the point that former left-wingers who disintegrate
internally tend to stop believing in anything.

Tsipras, who built his
entire political position on a pledge to abolish the Memoranda, now becomes
their loyal servant.

Varoufakis

Varoufakis is a more
complex figure. As we now know, he was doing things behind the scenes that
showed he had an awareness of the need to go beyond what was being said in
public. At the same time, he signed up to the 20 February 2015 agreement,
constantly defended it and was the first to make statements, as early as
February 2015, saying Greece should adopt 70 per cent of the Memorandum. He
bears a lot of responsibility for what happened. Nevertheless, he had a clearer
perception of the situation and was keen to adopt a more confrontational
attitude within that framework—and in fact this was why Tsipras chose him.
Tsipras sensed that, even if it was pure theatre, some such stance was
necessary if only for purposes of legitimation, or possibly for getting some
concessions, and that Dragasakis would be quite incapable of playing that role.
He needed a more flamboyant figure like Varoufakis.

The Referendum

As for Tsipras, the
one certainty we have is that he only thinks about tactics. There are two
possibilities, not mutually exclusive. The first is that he thought he could
get what he said: a further sign of popular support to improve his position in
the negotiations. The question posed would be sufficiently vague—No or Yes to
the Juncker package—that it wouldn’t raise the issue of rupture with the euro.
He must have imagined this would take place in a relatively controlled and calm
atmosphere—clearly he completely underestimated the effect of bank closures,
shortage of currency and so on, when the ECB upped the pressure by cutting off
the emergency funding mechanism to the banks. The tension rose suddenly that
Monday, 29 June, with the banks closing. At that point it was clear, I think,
that Tsipras either wanted the Yes to win, or a very narrow margin for the No.

The second possibility
is that he had already taken the decision to sign up to the Third Memorandum,
but needed a display of bravery up to the last moment, to legitimize it—so that
he could say, ‘You see, I’ve used all the weapons I had, and I couldn’t get
more than this; there is no alternative.’ So, those were the intentions.

Lessons for the
European Left

First, that it’s impossible to fight austerity or
neoliberalism within the framework of the existing monetary union, and, most
likely, of the EU as such. A rupture is indispensable. Second, the political
practice of radical-left parties vitally needs to articulate parliamentary
politics with popular mobilizations; when the second is lost, the first becomes
weightless, and actually reinforces the ongoing collapse of representative
politics. Third, a proper reinvention of a broad, anti-capitalist vision of
society is needed—neither a return to the old recipes, nor a mythical tabula
rasa.

It was predictable
that defeat in Greece would send a negative shock wave across the rest of
Europe. Though there are other factors involved, I think it played a role in
Podemos saying they won’t break with the euro, not even with the Stability
Pact, and revising their position on the debt. Currently, they’re not even
setting a break with austerity as a condition for collaboration at government
level. Iglesias says that the point is to rise above the shoulder of PSOE and
orient the hand of social democracy to the left. The Portuguese have drawn a
similar conclusion; there the impact of Syriza’s defeat is even more apparent.
I can understand that the deal struck by the Left Bloc and the Portuguese
Communist Party with the Socialists was to some extent a tactical move, because
the right had lost its majority in parliament, and there was a demand to allow
the Socialists to take over—otherwise the right would once again be in command.
But it’s a fundamental mistake for formations of the radical left to agree to a
line that is merely complementary to social democracy. We don’t need
radical-left parties to make deals with social democracy to limit foreclosures,
raise the minimum wage by €50, cancel some redundancies in the public sector,
and so on. If we really think that’s the best we can get, we should operate
within the framework of social democracy, and try to obtain some concrete
improvements. But for a political current that supposedly has an alternative
vision for society, accepting this as the horizon can amount to giving up on
that vision.

That’s the danger that
the remainder of the radical left faces in Europe now, after Syriza’s failed
attempt: the danger of giving up on the very idea of more radical change. But
not everyone draws the same conclusions. Mélenchon has organized discussions in
Paris about the need for a Plan B—I think he has drawn more correct conclusions
from the Greek case, and denounced Tsipras’s capitulation. He is now talking
openly about the necessity for all the parties of the European radical left to
make alternative plans which do include the option of leaving the euro and
preparation for full-scale confrontation. There is a similar conference in
Madrid initiated by the left of Podemos—Anticapitalistas and other forces on
the radical left in Spain, which also include part of the Catalan radical left,
and so on. So, there are forces who are drawing the relevant conclusions.